Should the county sell the BDC? Mayor Wamp and local entrepreneurs weigh in

By William Newlin

The fate of the Business Development Center (BDC) — a massive, valuable, and industrially significant building in Northshore — is in the hands of the Hamilton County Commission this week.

County Mayor Weston Wamp has asked commissioners to start a process to sell the almost 100-year-old building, which is county-owned and houses the INCubator program. Run by the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, the INCubator offers low-cost rent and business guidance to entrepreneurs.

Needed, ongoing repairs at the BDC as well as the county’s contribution to the INCubator are too costly, Wamp has said. The county spent $525,000 on the BDC last year out of its $1.1 billion budget.

Wamp is pushing to relocate the business incubator program to the upcoming Franklin-Roberts Future Ready school downtown, which plans to offer entrepreneurship courses when it opens in fall 2028.

“I’ve not heard a compelling argument for why we have a public incubator,” Wamp told Chattamatters. “The way I have rationalized a plan to invest in a brand new incubator is to align it with public education.”

Commissioners will vote whether to look for buyers for the BDC building at their May 6 meeting.

INCubator entrepreneurs and their supporters have said the possibility of a sale caught them by surprise, and they worry the program will suffer in its new location.

“The new building, the project — it sounds incredible,” said Kaleena Goldsworthy, COO of Proof Programs, a business support partner of the INCubator.  ”But it is not a replacement for what is happening here. And the way that it was presented to us kind of had us on our heels.”

An incubator, not the INCubator

After its life housing the American Lava Corporation and a 3M plant, the building at 100 Cherokee Boulevard became the BDC in 1988.

While Wamp expects the Franklin-Roberts center to offer a sleeker, more collaborative atmosphere than the BDC, the technical school will have less than half the leasable space. For county officials concerned with upkeep and what they consider wasted space at the over 100,000-square-foot BDC, that means greater efficiency.

Wamp hasn’t said whether the new incubator program will include current advisors, though he has identified the private, tech-focused incubation firm Brickyard, the support organization for Black-owned businesses, Chattanooga Business Elite, and startup accelerator CO.LAB as future partners.

“It’s nobody’s fault, but there’s a disconnect between several entrepreneurial entities and in the INCubator,” Wamp told commissioners at a April 15 public meeting. “It’s not a terribly inspiring building.”

Currently, the Tennessee Small Business Development Center and food and beverage incubators Proof Programs and LAUNCH are among the organizations holding classes and advising at the BDC.

For Jonathan Holman, CEO of INCubator client Layerworks Solutions, those supports helped him grow from a mechanical engineer who had “no idea what’s going on” into an industry player signing contracts with Ford and Lockheed Martin.

“Thanks to the INCubator program, all the programming, the connections, you know, the fantastic thing that’s set up here — I know how to run a business,” Holman said.

Holman said he’s ready to hire three to four employees, and although his time in the program is ending anyway, he’s concerned about local support for future manufacturers if the BDC disappears.

‘Education or manufacturing’

Down the hall from Holman, Hixson High School and UTC graduate Chantz Yanagida makes robots. CEO of Protoproof, he designs and fabricates tools to automate manufacturing processes. Think, the robot arms at the Volkswagen plant.

Protoproof is in the second of five years in the INCubator offered to companies proving growth. The standard program is three years.

Since the Franklin-Roberts school lacks a freight elevator and high-voltage plugs, Yanagida said “ it’s just not quite a good fit for our manufacturing.” Protoproof won’t make the move.

Plus, he said insurance liabilities mean Protoproof couldn’t bring on any high school students.

“I genuinely do believe that we can kind of come together as a community and not choose, ‘Oh, we have to pick, you know, education or manufacturing,’” Yanagida said. “It’s like, no, we’re going to be prosperous and we’re going to fight through this, so that we can absolutely have both and build a strong future.”

Wamp said the technical school has more high-grade specs than disappointed INCubator clients think.

 ”We’re trying to do a better job explaining all the dynamic opportunities at the new facility, because we basically get to design it exactly how we want,” Wamp told Chattamatters.

Not a new discussion

County officials have recommended offloading the BDC multiple times in the past 20 years, including “the first few weeks I was in office,” Wamp told commissioners on April 15.

His response in 2022: “You can’t sell the BDC.”

In 2024, county commissioners allocated $5.3 million for BDC renovations. About 90% of those dollars remain unspent. Wamp said advisors couldn’t assure him continued maintenance needs on the aging building’s HVAC, roof, and water systems wouldn’t tally millions more.

BDC entrepreneurs and supporters say the pressing maintenance issue is HVAC with a price tag far below the $4.7 million left over from the 2024 county commission-approved allocation.

“If you have a problem with your house roof, you don’t move houses. You just fix the roof,” said Konstantin Chinkov, who produces watercolor paints and booklets in his small BDC suite. “ Does it need updates? Yes. And again, we just want to be talked to.”

But Wamp said the opportunity to utilize the technical school makes it the right time for a move.

“ We’re making investments across the community that reflect our belief that we can do public education better,” he said.

What’s next?

The resolution before county commissioners on May 6 is whether to start a government-standard Request for Proposals (RFP) process on the BDC’s redevelopment. After last year’s countywide property reappraisal, the BDC is now valued at over $9.2 million.

Wamp has not said what he’d like to see the historic building become.

Entrepreneurs in the INCubator will have at least a year before moving out, county officials have said, given the uncertain timeline for receiving and approving proposals to redevelop the BDC.

County COO David Roddy told commissioners the county would work with the Chamber to resettle business owners, perhaps continuing to subsidize their rent.

“I hope that they have plans for all of these things,” Goldsworthy from Proof Programs said. “But again, we can only go based off of what we know. And that’s a really big concern because we know it’s working here.”

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Contact William at william@chattamatters.com